The big lads

A Ritz-Carlton hotel in California closed an entrance after a hummingbird made a nest on a door handle and, amidst all the daily ambient horror of simply being a person with a phone in 2026, it is nice to be reminded of the kinds of small lives we still agree to make room for. Have you noticed that we don’t get any art isms anymore? The 20th century minted them like currency: Expressionism. Impressionism. Cubism. Brutalism. All the big lads, all the heavy hitters of the ism game, all in a Parisian cafe in the 1900s going “what if a face but wrong” and changing the world forever. And now? I went on the Wikipedia page for 21st century art movements thinking I’d find the new Cubism, thinking I’d discover the movement that defines our age, and: it is short. It is 10 ways of saying “art, but with computers, but also online”. There is also something called post-postmodernism which gives me linguistic fatigue. That’s it. That’s the century so far. Japan has, by some fairly significant…